This is Harry Fine's personal blog containing his comments on current Ontario legal issues and the current state, complexities and absurdities of landlord and tenant law in Ontario. Harry is a paralegal with over 15 years practicing landlord and tenant, Small Claims and Human Rights law and is a former member of the Landlord and Tenant Board. The comments in this blog do not constitute legal advice.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

A Week in the Life of Scheduling Insanity at the Landlord and Tenant Board

Here's a week in the life of LTB scheduling insanity.
This true story has taken place over the last 10 days in my practice:

I wrote about this first fiasco in my previous blog. Basically the Toronto South hearing blocks
are so over-booked that the same matter went two hearing days, December 10th and January 26th, only to twice get
pushed off the docket and not heard. My
client was rather upset to put it mildly. Rather than take a third day off from his work and pay
me for a third time, the client paid the tenant to go away.

Next, a tenant sues a landlord who then retains me to
defend him. The application alleges
harassment and interference with enjoyment.
The hearing is scheduled for February 10th in Newmarket. I'm not available, I'm booked elsewhere. We seek the tenant's consent to reschedule
and she grants it in principle. But the
tenant calls the LTB about rescheduling and finds out that it could be 6 weeks
before we come back. She changes her mind and withdraws consent. So the parties will waste their time and use valuable hearing time in Newmarket.

Next, a tenant sues my small-landlord client for alleged
maintenance issues. A hearing is
scheduled for Toronto North on February 2nd.
My client is served and once again, I'm not available on that date. I write the tenant a letter, a reasonable guy, asking
for his consent to reschedule. He gives
his consent, with his availability dates through to the end of March, but
warning me that they are subject to change.
The tenant relies on me to get a new date, asking me to please book
quickly. I go to the LTB counter in
person to re-schedule, using my dates and his to come up with a list of dates
that work. The CSR tries, but can't find
any available dates as there were not many hearing blocks opened up very deep into the future, which is all too common. So I send the coordinator a faxed request to
reschedule with the signed consent and dates, telling him that the dates may be
subject to change and that I'd appreciate him scheduling based on our
availability as soon as possible. The
file seems to have disappeared into a black hole. Soon they will be scheduling past our
provided dates, or one or the other of us will have booked over those
dates. Perhaps we should put our lives
on hold and make no plans for a month until the date is set.

Here's the best one.
Snowmaaggedon arrives on February 2nd.
Its our third appearance in Cobourg on a complex eviction manner, but
the LTB cancelled the hearing docket the day prior. On its own initiative the Board rescheduled
all the matters in the block to February 15th.
But I was booked elsewhere on that date so the next day I spoke with the clinic
lawyer on the other side and we came up with some dates the worked
for us both. So off to the scheduling
counter goes my staff, with signed consent for a return date later in
March. Imagine our surprise when told
that we can't consent to a date, that we need the adjudicator's consent, and
that we would have to go to Cobourg on the 15th. Would that be my left side or right, cause
the other half of me is in Scarborough? And of course this application, scheduled for an hour, will ultimately be adjourned with an hour hole in the middle of the hearing block being wasted.

And finally, take a look at the LTB's web site where in
2009 one could check their file's application status online, see if a date was
booked, see if the order had been written.

Look at the notice date...April 27th, 2009. Its been down for almost 2 years as the Board's failed new case management
system has been rolled out. The
implementation of their new product has been an utter failure.

The LTB is badly broken. The government doesn't seem to
care. The parties are almost universally
dissatisfied. The Minister needs to take a look at the entire operation and perhaps return L&T cases to the Courts.